


The Man in the Leather Coat

by Skyler10



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Childhood Memories, F/M, Family Secrets, Identity Reveal, Kid Fic, Memories, Pete's World
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-15
Updated: 2015-05-15
Packaged: 2018-03-30 16:57:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,685
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3944485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skyler10/pseuds/Skyler10
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rose and Tentoo’s daughter discovers her Gallifreyan heritage.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Man in the Leather Coat

It’s funny how, as a kid, you just take for granted certain elements in your home that would strike others as odd. For example, why my mother kept a terribly blurry photo of herself with a man in black leather in the bedroom she shared with my father.

I suppose I always assumed it was an uncle or another relative she was close to. It obviously wasn’t her father or brother. And I was certain it wasn’t Dad.

Until the day I found out it was.

One evening when I was nine, as I watched her get ready for a fancy grown-up Vitex party, I asked her about him, the man with big ears and short-cropped hair and no smile. Why didn’t he smile? Didn’t everyone smile in photographs?

No, she had replied. He did have a fantastic smile, but he was very sad on the inside way back then and he didn’t always smile in photos.

“But Mummy, why was he sad?”

“He lost everything, darling. His whole planet, his people, his home. All gone in a terrible war.”

“Is that why we’ve never visited him? We visit all your other friends on other planets. But I’ve never met him.”

“No…” Mother had smiled gently and turned to take my small hands in her soft, elegant ones. “It’s very complicated. Maybe when you are older.”

“At least tell me his name, Mum. I feel like I know him somehow. But that’s silly isn’t it? I can’t.”

“It’s not silly at all,” she assured me with a sigh. “I should really talk to your father about this first…”

“Talk to me about what?” Dad interrupted as he entered the room. I still remember the way he lifted an eyebrow in inquiry, tie loose around his neck, just waiting for her precise fingers to weave it into place like always.

“She wants to know who the man in the photo is.” My mother tilted her head toward the framed image, but he seemed to already know exactly which one.

“Ah. Old big ears and leather, hm?”

“Who was he, Daddy?” I tried my luck with my more indulgent parent. I would have gone to him first, had I known it would be this difficult. She might be the one in the picture, but he was far more likely to play the willing storyteller.

“Tell her,” Mum instructed with an expression I didn’t understand.

“Sweetheart,” he began as he sat down next to me on the bed. “You know how we are… a little different from the other families at school? How we can’t talk about our adventures except to Grandma and Grandpa and Uncle Tony?”

I nodded, unsure of what this had to do with the man too sad to smile in the low-quality photo. It must have been taken with an ancient mobile like Mum’s photos of her old friends Mickey, Shareen and Keisha. She had showed them to me the previous school year when I struggled to find anyone willing to commit social suicide by hanging out with my “royal nerdiness.”

“There’s a reason you might feel different than your peers,” Dad continued his explanation that I hoped would eventually answer my question. “We – I, and by extension, you, – are not entirely human. Mostly human, but there are certain parts, mainly your mind, that isn’t.”

I simply stared at him for a long minute. Then I turned to my mother.

“And Mum? Are you?”

“Nope. 100% Earthling here. Ordinary human-”

“With some accidental enhancements,” my father interrupted. It would be many years before I found out about the genetic effects of Bad Wolf and how she had loved him so fiercely so young.

“That’s a story for another night,” she countered. “But to answer your original question-”

“It’s me,” Dad finished her sentence again, as they tended to do. “That man in the photo is me in another form. How I used to be.”

“There’s no way,” I huffed and rolled my eyes. I should have known they would make this into a joke when they didn’t want to answer.

“I’m serious.” I knew he couldn’t read my mind (could he?) but it was too impossible. He saw my disbelief and continued. “I wasn’t always part-human, you see. I used to be a Time Lord, fully ‘alien.’ Still am in some ways, but now I’m – we’re – human too.”

“Is that why we do things no one else does? Why we can visit the places in my history books and no one else can?”

“Exactly,” he smiled, relieved I was following. “Time and space travel is in your DNA. And part of being a Time Lord, part that I don’t have anymore, is that we could change what we look like.”

“Like Tonks in Harry Potter?” I asked naively.

“No, not like Tonks. Only when we’re dying. We could change every bit of our bodies, our habits, our personalities, but it’s still the same man inside.”

“You were dying?” I shuddered. “How?”

“He saved me,” Mum interjected. “He died to save my life and turned into the Dad you know.”

“Exactly. Well. Sort of,” he amended. “That is, eventually. There are a few details from your bedtime stories we need to fill in, now that you are older and can understand them.”

“I promise I won’t tell anyone,” I assured them before they even asked. If I had learned anything in life by now, it was that what happened in our family stayed in our family. This sent a flicker of heartbreak across my mum’s face, but I also knew the second rule of our family: some questions were best left unasked.

Dad picked up the photo and brought it back to me for examination.

“I am him,” he concluded. “That’s me right there with your mum. She was just 19 then, and we were off to see the universe.”

“Your grandmother took it on one of our visits home,” Mum reminisced. “She stole my mobile when I wasn’t paying attention. Said you never know what you’ll wish you could remember. And she was right. That was a very long time ago and now it seems so far away.”

“It’s alright,” he comforted her. “I’ll remember for both of us.”

“Dad, is that why I don’t forget things?” I asked. “And I have to pretend to be only a little bit good at maths when it’s always too easy?”

“You do what?!” He startled. Apparently I wasn’t being as communicative about school as I thought.

“Will I change too?” I pressed. “Is that how you and Mum talk by touching? Will I be able to do that too?”

“We don’t know, sweetheart,” Mum confessed. “There’s never been anyone like you in all the history of time.”

“You,” Dad said with a kiss to my head, “are completely unique. Novel to this world. No one like you.”

“They tell us that in school all the time,” I mused. “But I never quite believed it.”

“Believe it,” he urged. “It’s more true for you than they will ever know. But no, I don’t think you will change like I did. Perhaps you will live longer than most people. And maybe you have a bit of touch telepathy in you somewhere too. But it’s very rare to find anyone here who can talk back through it. And it won’t show up until you are much older.”

“Maybe,” I shared my deepest nine-year-old girl hope, “if I find my true love, like you and Mum?”

“Someone’s been watching too much Disney,” Mum mumbled under her breath.

But Dad just smiled.

“Yeah, maybe.” He took the photo back. “But even if you don’t have that bond, it doesn’t make it any less real, you understand? Just because it isn’t the same as what we have doesn’t mean it’s wrong.”

“Ok.” I tried to absorb all this information. My father was an alien. Still is a bit, he says. I’m part alien. I’m potentially telepathic at a single touch.

“But what if I do have it? What if I can read people’s thoughts by touching them? What if no one else can? If I’m the only one…”

Suddenly my mother’s words echoed back. He lost everything and everyone. He was totally and completely alone. Panic arose within me.

“You never have to be alone,” he rushed to answer my true question. “We will always be there to protect you, to be with you, even if it’s just the three of us.”

“And the TARDIS,” Mum added. “That’s how we can fly her. Someday maybe you can too.”

My little heart brightened at that prospect. I dearly loved our ship.

Of course, my father knew he couldn’t keep his promise. Even he wouldn’t live forever.

It took more prodding, but over the next few years as I turned from curious girl to bookish teenager to junior Torchwood agent, I found out more. Most from my parents, a few stories from my grandmother, but also some from stumbling across their personnel files during my internship at the “family business.” I sometimes wonder now if my grandfather assigned me certain duties so I would have the opportunity to discover my parents’ pasts for myself. The things they wouldn’t say. The other world they were separated from, the reason I had no paternal grandparents, the lost planet of my heritage I would never see. I knew better than to ask those questions, the ones that earned me a haunted look from my mother or an energetic change of topic from my father.

But still to this day I find myself wandering into their room, retrieving something for one of them or pulling Christmas decorations out of the closet, and I stop to remember the man in leather. The one who gave his life for them, for their future, for the possibility of me. My very existence, all from an alien’s sacrifice in a distant future in another dimension. But he isn’t just a somber stranger from another planet. That man is my father, one and the same. And I love him, big ears and all.

 

 

 

 


End file.
